Who Is Answerable In Murshidabad?

Middle Bengal’s historic Murshidabad district witnessed unprecedented violence over the Waqf (Amendment) Act, resulting in the deaths of three persons on Saturday. None of the deceased – Ijaz Ahmed, a student, and a father and son of one Das family, Haragovinda and Chandan – were actively instigating violence or part of any political outfit, as their friends and neighbours claimed, and yet they were killed.

A blame game has started identifying hitherto ‘unknown miscreants’, while an important question has to be asked. Who is responsible for the violence? Interestingly, while asking the question, hardly anyone is underscoring significant information. The ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) overwhelmingly bagged almost all the seats in nearly all the elections in the last few years. Let us look at the nature of TMC’s control.

Murshidabad has more than 66 percent Muslim population, as per the 2011 census, and TMC bagged all three parliamentary seats in 2024, including Jangipur at the epicentre of the weekend’s violence. Out of the district's 22 assembly seats, TMC has 20; the party controls all 26 Panchayat Samitis and nearly all of the 250 Gram Panchayats. Out of eight Municipalities of the district, TMC has seven, and the one that is left out – Domkal – is run by a TMC-appointed administrator.

Rarely can a party have such outstanding control over every tier in a huge district with more than seven million people. The obvious answer, therefore, to the above question is none other than the TMC is responsible for large-scale weekend violence, arson, looting and lawlessness. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is often blamed for instigating such violence, and it has a reason as well, yet in Murshidabad, the argument will not hold as the national party has no footprint in the district.

This leads to the second question: if a situation spirals out so fast in a district controlled by the TMC, then finally, who gets into trouble? Again, the answer is TMC. Such uncontrolled violence, instigated by a lazy district administration, will only polarize votes. Effectively, it damages TMC. The state did witness extreme polarisation in the 2019 Lok Sabha (LS) polls when the BJP’s Hindu vote share went up by a walloping 36%-- from 21 to 57 percentage points – owing to massive polarisation.

The BJP had bagged 18 out of 42 LS seats. The result had shaken Ms Banerjee, who was facing a state poll in two years, and thus the party decided to appoint emergency-election-cracker Prashant Kishore. Mr Kishore indeed rescued TMC, while cautioning both the Hindu and the Muslim leaders to shun all forms of polarisation.

One suggestion – as told by a former minority MP of TMC – went like this: “Minority leaders should not be seen with caps on, standing next to top TMC leaders.” The ship with a wobbly sole was saved. Yet, TMC is failing at multiple levels a year before the polls. The wound caused by the primary school teacher recruitment scam is festering. The new wound has a more severe potential to consolidate the Hindu votes, unlike in recruitment scam.

A diligent observer of state politics Maidul Islam, a professor of political science at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, puts it succinctly: “There is a possibility of such low-scale communal clashes, if the state administration does not take strong actions against the culprits without seeing their political and community colour. Low-scale communal violence in areas with a significant Muslim population always paid rich electoral dividends for the BJP.” The warning has a clear message: do not trust the theory of ‘reverse polarisation’ to accumulate minority votes against the majority consolidation to win the next poll. It may not work in 2026.

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